The Wild Winds of Fortune

I am beginning to sympathize with honest policemen.

What with all the cops who have been implicated in killings over the past few years, it must be hard to be a good cop. I have never doubted that they are out there — even as there are cities with horrible histories of police brutality, such as Cleveland or Baltimore, there are cities who firmly believe in treating the community respectfully. Richmond, California comes to mind.

But being a cop in those cities must be made immeasurably harder by those responsible for the deaths of Freddie Gray, and Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice, just to name three of the African-American men and boys killed senselessly. You can add the suspicious death of Sandra Bland to that list.

But I am currently thinking about those good cops right now because of the shooting in Chattanooga. Recent news reports state that his family was worried about his depression, and that he wrote in his diaries of wanting to kill himself.

Given that and the Germanwings pilot earlier this year who committed murder-suicide, I can just hear the the discussions now about how people who are depressed or suicidal pose a danger to everyone about them.

I am sure that there are those now who will think twice about being friends with people suffering from depression; employers who would not hire anyone with such a history. It’s illegal, of course, but what’s the law — especially if you know that it is unlikely that you would ever be caught — against what you think is personal safety? The fact that most people who are depressed (even most men) are a danger to no one but themselves — and, depending upon their circumstances, maybe not even that — might weigh very little. It’s why most people cannot talk about their disability at work. It’s why I am now going to take one of my two publications off my resume.

It should be unnecessary for me to say it but the truth is that most people who commit violent crimes are not mentally ill. Dylann Roof, for example: driven by a evil ideology, he gunned down nine people in a house of worship.  In the ensuing debate about his mental health, I lost a friend. In this case, it was my choice not to remain friends with someone who insisted that “anyone who commits murder must be mentally ill” and who refused to see how so many people take that statement and reverse it.

A doctor I saw recently told me how brave I was to be open about my disorder. Funny but I never felt brave. I felt driven, and committed. I knew that I had lost people who had decided being friends with someone like me was too much trouble, or too scary. I decided it was worth it to be honest, and to hopefully be a counterweight to all the news stories about violent mentally ill people. I told the doctor in question that I looked for inspiration to the generation of gay men and lesbians who had come out of the closet and eased the stigma of being gay. Maybe, by coming down from the attic, I could help do the same.

I have felt resolute.

Right now, though, I feel worried. And I tell myself that I am overreacting, that, the Chattanooga shooter notwithstanding, things are getting better.

I tell myself that, but I don’t think I believe it.

Edited to add: Almost like they read my mind, Cracked.com published a very perceptive article on bipolar disorder from a woman who suffers from it.

The distinction I made in the last post (evil as opposed to mental illness) matters a great deal.  In a discussion in my Facebook, a friend said “People in their right minds don’t kill other people. Period. Whatever you want to call it…I would not want to work with someone who might decide to kill me, I do not want to be friends with them, since they might kill me, and I don’t want them marrying into my family since they might kill me.”

I responded “Do you think I might kill you?”

“No,” she shot back, “I know you….”

Exactly. She knows me.  She knows I would not hurt her, or anyone else. (I’ve never been a danger to anyone other than occasionally myself.) But if she didn’t, if all she knew about the mentally ill was what she saw on cable news and crime shows, if the words “mental illness” only brought forth images of Dylann Roof, Eliot Rogers, and Adam Lanza, then she might well refuse to work with me, or be friends with me, or have me marry into her family.  Because all she would know of mental illness — or most of what she would know of mental illness — would be that mentally ill people are a dangers to others.

Evil exists. Eliding the difference between it and mental illness presents real dangers of making lives even harder for a lot of people who have life difficult enough.

On Facebook, I have seen people insisting that Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who shot nine people in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church had to have been mentally ill because “no one just walks into a church and shoots people unless he is mentally ill.” This before any information about his mental health history has been released.

Wrong.

No one has claimed the Boston bombers were mentally ill, or  the people behind 9/11.  They were not mentally ill but motivated by a vile and murderous ideology.

As was Dylann Roof.

Of course, all those other people were Muslims. We are willing to call them terrorists, but when a young white man who clearly has a white supremacist political and social agenda walks into — is welcomed into — a church with the historical importance of Mother Emanuel and shoots up the place we start looking for mental illness.

The arguments start that hatred and extremism are mental illnesses.  Funny, I don’t remember anyone claiming that about Islamic extremism when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was on trial . Furthermore, that claim ignores that fact that extremism is learned behavior — learned from family, from peers, from the media, from society.  The moment we ignore that, we let a whole slew of people off of the hook for the poison they spew. Extremism can be renounced, a luxury which many of the mentally ill wish they had.

The arguments sound similar to those floated around Eliot Rogers, the Santa Barbara shooter. A lot of discussion arose about Rogers’s history of depression, which often ignored the virulent misogyny which was simply a more pronounced version than that which exists all around us.

Was Dylan Roof mentally ill? Who knows? According to news reports, he had not been diagnosed with any mental illness. I am sure that he will receive a thorough psychiatric evaluation before his trial. The best evidence seems to be that he would go on drunken rants in which he spewed his poisonous views. Bigots do that all the time.  The argument that “only someone mentally ill shoots up the church” begs the question of whether or not the gunman was in fact mentally ill.

Most crime is committed by people with no mental illness; the mentally ill are more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators.  Some (more than any reasonable society should tolerate) do end up on the street or in prison, but they are also all around you, and you may never know. As I have said before, here in Silicon Valley it is safer to come out of the closet than down from the attic.*

People with mental illness struggle with acceptance all the time.  Are we to be saddled with the burden of association with such a man?

*Case in point: ever since the publication of Motherhood and Mental Illness: Stories of Recovery and Hope, to which I contributed a chapter, I have been open about my bipolar disorder. I thought it was a little silly to have a published article in which I described my life and still keep hidden.  I was talking to coworkers in a bar after our shift, and the subject came up.  When I mentioned that I was bipolar, a coworker quietly said “I’m bipolar too.” I had worked with them for three years. In that time we had discussed a lot of parts of our personal history, and neither of us had felt comfortable talking about our shared issues.